It is like that sometimes
when I see the corpse of a stranger. That kind of death,
from the outside of someone else’s final breath . . .
it makes the air stop,
the ocean turn more slowly,
the earth a cradle
a cemetery
a monument
a stone
like a dead boy resting in the sand.
Head over Heels
They hand me the microphone as my shoulder sinks under the weight of this dress;
The woman says,
The one-millionth refugee just left South Sudan; can you comment?
I feel my feet rock back and forth
on the heels my mother bought
Begging the question,
do we stay, or is it safer to choose flight?
My mind echoes through the numbers:
One million gone, 400,000 dead in Darfur,
two million displaced
and this lump takes over my throat as if each of those bodies found a grave right here in my esophagus.
Our once country—
all west, and south, and east, and north—
so restless, the Nile couldn’t hold us together
and you ask me to summarize?
They talk about the numbers as if this isn’t still happening,
As if 500,000 didn’t just die in Syria,
as if 3,000 aren’t still making their final stand
at the bottom of the Mediterranean,
as if there aren’t entire volumes full of factsheets about our genocide and now you want me to write one?
Fact: we never talked over breakfast because the
warplanes would swallow our voices.
Fact: my grandfather didn’t want to leave home
so he died in a war zone.
Fact: a burning bush without God is just a fire.
I measure the distance between what I know and what is safe to say on a microphone.
Do I talk about sorrow, displacement?
Do I mention the violence?
How it’s never as simple as what we see on TV?
How there are weeks’ worth of fear before the camera is on?
Do I talk about our bodies? How they are 60 percent water, but we still burn like driftwood?
Do I tell her the men died first? Mothers forced to watch the slaughter?
That they came for our children?
Scattering them across the continent
until our homes sank, that even castles sink at the bite of the bomb?
Do I mention the elderly? Our heroes—
too weak to run too expensive to shoot?
How they would march them hands raised, rifles at their backs into the fire?
How their walking sticks kept the flames alive?
It sounds too harsh for a bundle of wires and an audience to swallow; too relentless,
like the valley that filled with the putrid smoke of our deaths.
Is it better in verse? Can a stanza become a burial shroud?
Will it sting less if I say it softly?
Will the pain leave when the microphone does?
If you don’t see me cry, will you listen better?
30 seconds for the sound bite and now 3 minutes for the poem. Why does every word feel like I’m saying my last?
My tongue goes dry, the same way we died—
becoming ash without ever having been coal.
I feel my left leg go numb and realize that I locked my knees,
bracing for impact.
I never wear shoes I can’t run in.
Dr. Poem
His daughter was dying, so he begged my father
to look after her.
My dad said, don’t worry, bones heal;
it’s the waiting that gets you.
In that moment, I was convinced
that my father could fix everything.
I am not my father.
I stare at my hands each day
wondering when they’ll look like his.
It was midday and the doctors
were stressed but still moving.
I was working in the only birthing hospital
for miles in my homeland, Darfur.
When I go home, they call it
community service—
the prodigal daughter returns
from America to heal her people
with the things she learned in her ivory tower—
but there are things in medicine
we don’t have scientific names for.
I was one of six doctors, I am not a doctor.
When they brought in our patients
with all that blood on the outside
of their bodies
and tears,
and dust,
and the mothers wondering
if they can resurrect the earth
to plead with the angels of death
on their behalf,
The operation room became a trial
the scalpel a gavel
and every doctor a perjurer
on this broken witness stand.
We were arbiters of death.
This isn’t how it was meant to be.
When my cousin’s stomach split open
and the confetti of his gut littered the floor;
When my uncle drank the river through his lungs;
When the illness stole the girl
across the street in broad daylight;
When my brother caved to the embrace
of the second bullet;
When the cancer came for all the things
the war had left behind—
I wished I were my father or someone,
or God—a doctor a doctor a doctor—
But what do you say when their first question
is about the war?
What happens when they hate you
for bringing them back?
Or when the insurance won’t pay for the operation
and you still can’t afford it either?
Or when they bomb the hospital
so you have to operate without borders?
Or when they hold you at gunpoint
for transporting vaccinations so the children
can survive until after the war?
I still don’t know what comes
after the war.
Or when the husband won’t sign the consent form
for his wife’s treatment
because a fully conscious woman
doesn’t have that right in my homeland.
When I tell you misogyny is life-threatening,
When I tell you the patriarchy can kill you,
this is what I mean.
In one day, we had six emergency
C-sections.
An entire would-be classroom of infants
passed through our halls,
each of them fighting for their lives
without any knowledge
of how many of us had to fight for it first.
I’m ashamed to admit the guilt
of being a doctor in the war zone,
Bringing children into Armageddon.
But, they have to understand that their lives matter
and I can’t fix anything, but I can make them
breathe, breathe,
breathe.
Bird-Watching on Lesvos Island
I met a woman, her mother, and her son
all under the subtle shade of a tent—
three generations held together
<
br /> in one morsel of time.
The life of a refugee is counted in moments.
In this moment, we were bird-watching
on Lesvos Island.
The sun melted the clouds across our vision
as the first bird spiraled brilliantly
toward the Aegean shore.
To go from bird-watching to boat-watching
in Greece is to witness the world unfurl.
I was told of days when the birds came in hoards
broken-winged and heaving, spilling forth 50 to 80 hatchlings at a time,
each broken shell another person seeking rest.
floating rubber albatrosses, box-figured crows,
hugged the horizon in the bitter cold.
When an island becomes a door,
who will answer?
If enough eyes see a body in the water
and no hands reach out to rescue her,
did she really die?
This time, when the world left infants
to take their first steps at the edge
of humanity;
when the seams broke and the threads
lay society bare;
the eyes came and the helping hands
followed.
Imagine rivers full of people carrying people
on their backs.
Imagine shores covered in footprints,
and wheelchair tracks,
the passion it takes to swallow the wind,
kiss the October Sea
and meet the boats.
I’ve seen how paperwork can divide families,
separating mother and father
with the stroke of a pen.
How firm handshakes can unravel entire nations
when the stage is big enough.
If I had the power, I would have paper-mached
those contracts;
I would have lined the ceilings
with paper cup lights;
I would have painted every wall cerulean
so even the smallest of palms
could reach for the sky.
I would have lined entire rooms with books
and kitchens with the warmest pies.
I would have carpeted camps with chalk
to build a home
to make a refuge, to bring the dignity back
into a concrete oasis.
I would have built a camp
that is a call to prayer
where a person who is carried in
can leave walking.
This is what I saw on Lesvos Island.
When a child is born in the context of war,
this is how you unravel the world to them
how you unveil music to their ears.
I have stood on both sides now
and I can tell you that in Lesvos,
the cats are white with brown spots
because a child’s painting told me so.
That life-jacket bags are in style
because a boy named Suhaib showed me so.
That a village can all stand together
because a woman willed it so.
Safe passage begins by asking the questions
no one will dare to utter,
and becoming the answer
no one could possibly
imagine.
stand up to allah
Take Notes
A woman came to campus.
She told us to stand up to Allah.
My friend said we do;
five times a day.
Prayer is a dialogue in
which all persons have equal access
to the microphone.
To Envy a Scavenger
Twin-size sheet, white—
burial shroud
fastened to a child.
Her mother’s face carried
more death than the coffin.
Her father, for the first time in months,
the only doctor by her side
The Imam’s voice hummed the scripture.
To my left,
a crow surveyed the scene.
I swung my hand toward the windowsill.
Not violence.
A plea. It took flight.
Tenets
Four men stood
smoking by the mosque,
scorched tobacco
billowing
against Moroccan-style tile.
One among them paused:
Isn’t smoking forbidden?
In unison:
God is forgiving
Deliverance in the Information Age
I bought an app to track prayer:
religiosity in the palm of my hand.
It came with a compass,
tenet guide, settings for school of thought
Reminders for prayer,
supplication,
good deeds—
God in a few megabytes.
No option for rejuvenation.
No new feature for forgiveness.
If I clear data, will my sins vanish?
Can this silicone chip carry my pride,
contain my envy, my anger, my sloth?
Is this want for gilded grace not greed?
Crescent moon and star emoji,
little Mecca on my screen,
will you ask the angels for me
what salvation looks like
after 2016?
You Have a Big Imagination, or 400,000 Ways to Cry
I am a sad girl, but my face makes other plans
Focusing energy on this smile
so as not to waste it on pain.
The first thing they took was my sleep,
eyes heavy but wide open
Thinking maybe I missed something,
maybe the cavalry is still coming.
They didn’t come, so I bought bigger pillows.
My grandma could cure anything by talking the life
out of it and she said
I could make a thief in a silo laugh
in the middle of our raging war.
War makes a broken marriage bed out of sorrow—
you want nothing more than to disappear,
yet your heart can’t bear to leave.
But love, love is the armor we carried across the borders of our broken homeland.
A hasty mix of stories that last long after the flavor is gone, and muscle memory that overcomes
even the most bitter of times.
My memory is spotted with days of laughing
until I cried or crying until I laughed—
laughter and tears are both involuntary
reactions, testaments of human expression.
So allow me to express, that if I make you laugh,
It’s usually on purpose
and if I make you cry, I promise I’ll still think
you are beautiful.
I learned love in France, my cousin Zeinab bedridden
on a random afternoon.
Dilated fibromyalgia—her heart muscles expanded until they no longer functioned
I hadn’t seen her since that last time
in Sudan together and there I was at her bedside
in a 400-year-old hospital in Paris.
This is for Zeinab who wanted to hear poems.
Suddenly, English Arabic and French
were not enough. Every word I knew
was empty noise, and she said,
well get on with it
It was the m
ost important stage I’ve ever been on—
surrounded by family, by remnants of a people
who were given as a dowry
to relentless war
but still manage
to make pearls of this life.
The family that taught me not only to laugh
but to live in the face of death
Placing their hands across the sun
saying, See that, I’ll meet you there!
and for Zeinab who on her deathbed
wanted to hear
poems.
Most days I am only sandstone, but
in her arms I felt like gold.
And we laughed and we loved, and I asked,
Isn’t it strange that the only problem
is your heart was too big?
October, or My Uncle Calls to Say Grandma Has Died
The water drained my blood, my fingers ginger roots
in a bodiless house, a cathedral where no one prays,
a mosque burned to dust, a woman
You’re my mother and you’re going to die here
me to my grandmother’s daughter.
How can I leave when she won’t
my mother to the silence, my mother to the soap
my mother to the pear tree, my mother to the bed.
My mother to her shoes, my mother to the sky,
my mother to the heat, my mother to the woman
she would not see until the next life.
Dad
When I was little, you built us a snow globe
with your own hands,
stretched out the glass around us
until everything was suspended.
Peace floating in the spaces between our fingers.
We lived in slow motion.
In there I was your apprentice,
handling screwdrivers and monkey wrenches
faster than I could name them.
How many times have I told you,
stainless steel is not for little girls?
I know, but it was the only way we could ever fix things that didn’t break us.
Dad, it’s the third time this month
that I’ll watch you walk out our door
off to mend bridges that always lead away
from our family.
Twelve years and the bodies of my aunts,
uncles, cousins, all the branches of our family tree
haven’t stopped hitting the ground
so you were enlisted to pick up the pieces.
Sisters' Entrance Page 3
